Unwifeable(3)

As I read over his message in my tiny windowless cubicle in Chicago, I let out a little yelp of excitement. Every letter in his email seemed to vibrate off the computer like a living thing—overpowering the sad little tropical desert island screen saver that formed the background on my ancient monitor.

I felt like a prisoner receiving a stay of career execution. I wrote back immediately: “Hey, Steve, I would love to write for you.”

Of course, I had nothing in the way of recent clips (my last newspaper job after the Washington Post had been a short stint at the Des Moines Register from 1998 to 1999 covering cops and courts and drunkenly hooking up with fellow reporter Jeff Zeleny before he came out as gay and rose to fame in TV news). But I did have Steve’s curiosity on my side. Like any good Internet user in 2004, Steve had googled me and found something that showed where I was really at in my writing life beyond my oh-so-professional email signature that read “Assistant Director of Publications and Public Relations, Northwestern University Medical School.”

In 2004, I had secretly started a blog.

My relationship with my husband, James, was on the rocks, my career was going nowhere, and so for the first time in years, I tried writing for myself again—this time for fun. During this uncertain period, I somehow stumbled into chronicling the dissolution of my own marriage.

“I learned something disheartening recently,” I wrote in one extremely coded, euphemistic blog post about finding out a woman who’d lobbied hard to be my best friend (“Hey, Mandy, love your blog, let me take pictures of you!”) was actually taking it in the ass from James all the while. “It disheartened me. I guess we covered that.”

The minute I got the email from Steve, I obsessively checked my blog’s StatCounter and there I saw it: again and again, a News Corp IP address that showed someone who worked there had been checking what I was writing almost daily. I knew it had to be Steve.

From that point forward, as I sat in my gray-fabric-lined little box at the medical school writing about science grants while I watched Comedy Central in the background, I would make it a priority to religiously update my blog.

I treated it like a tryout session, an audition for him and anyone else who might be reading. At night, as I came home to my Gothic converted servants’ quarters turned guesthouse in Humboldt Park where my husband and I were still living, my arms were filled to overflowing with stacks of celebrity magazines to stay current.

Daily, I searched to find a comedic angle on every fresh new pop culture obsession.

When TomKat was huge, I stationed myself on top of our orange velour couch, which we’d found outside a Dumpster, and basically read every article on Scientology ever written. Then I wrote a satirical “day in the life” story about the couple. Emboldened by the emerging linking economy, I forwarded the post on to Mark Lisanti at Defamer, whom I had never communicated with before, with the subject line “For your consideration”—and a day later, he linked it. Soon after that, I made up a fake Martha Stewart catchphrase for her new Apprentice-style reality show. Linked again! I watched as hits on my blog climbed into the thousands. And still, StatCounter showed that News Corp IP.

But then, just as quickly as my great career hope had arrived, Steve fell off the radar. Didn’t write back to my pitches. Didn’t run a sample thing I wrote for him. Nothing.

When last minute my dear high school friend Siobhan Foley changed her wedding destination from Ireland to New York, I took a chance and emailed Steve again in early August.

“Hey, Steve,” I wrote, “if you’re still alive, perhaps we can get together for a drink when I’m in New York Sept. 23–25 for a wedding.”

Again . . . silence. By that point, I knew I needed to make dramatic changes in my personal life as my happiness and sanity continued to plummet. I made a resolution that I would:

1. End my marriage to James.

2. Move home to live with my mom, who said she was excited to have me back home in San Diego.

Unfortunately, that plan quickly unraveled, too, when . . .

1. My parents called to tell me they were getting back together after their five-year-long divorce.

2. Hopefully I could figure something else out?

A day before I was set to fly out to New York for my friend’s wedding, I checked my email one last time. There it was. Steve.

“Am I too late for this?” he wrote. “I’ve been on jury duty and am seriously sorry and would like to see you.”

While I had no hope that anything would come out of it, we made a plan to text while I was in the city. Emboldened by finally hearing back from Steve, I decided to test my cold-call-emailing luck and wrote a short note to the author Jonathan Ames, too. I had met him once after he spoke in Chicago as part of my friend Davonna’s thesis showcase.

He was the closest thing to a real-life New York celebrity I had in my Rolodex, and I somehow thought meeting him might impress Steve and show him how connected I was.

“Hey, I’m in NY this weekend for a wedding,” I emailed Jonathan. “Any chance of getting coffee or tea, or are you performing somewhere famous? That tall blond girl from Davonna’s thing. Yep.”

I made sure to send him a link to my blog—which featured all my romantic dalliances—to show him that I was single, skinny, separated from my husband after five years of marriage, and very much dating. On the blog, I wrote stories and showed pictures of nights out with suitors who ranged from guys who at first seemed un-googlable (savvy friends quickly informed me this meant they were just using fake names and, oh yeah, married) to headache-inducing frat bros driving Hummers to an older lawyer named Scott who took me out on his yacht.